Trying to solve problems like Maria

Stinkberry

As much as I love getting on the trendy food bandwagon (truffles! cupcakes! macaroni-and-cheese-only restaurants!), I really don’t like Pinkberry. Love the idea, love the name, love the overly design-y decor, hate the taste. Sorry, friends! I put sweeteners, fruit and granola on my Fage (Fay-eh!) to mask it’s sour taste while getting all of it’s creamy texture, but I wouldn’t whip it with air and freeze it and do other unspecified and not necessarily natural things to it and buy it for $6 a serving.

Which is why I love Yogurtland (I especially love Yogurtland’s name! I’ve been magically whisked away to…Yogurtland! I won an all expense paid trip to…Yogurtland! You get the point, there is pun-potential here.) Glennis and I went yesterday on Kate’s recommendation and I fell in love with this live, active, cultural phenomenon for the following reasons:

A) You choose how much or little yogurt you want, AND as much or little (many or few?) toppings. When have you ever gotten to do that (unless you were me in high school and worked at a TCBY where you would eat cups and cups of yogurt with cups and cups of sugar-free hot fudge on top because you probably had some food issues that should have been addressed)?

A, part 2) Conventional sizing structures need not apply! If you want kid-sized cup, you can take an ounce or two and that’s okay, you don’t have to say “One child size cup please!” and make people think you are watching your girlish figure or wonder if you have a child waiting outside on a leash. If you are especially sad on a particular day, you can squeeze yourself out a quart, no one will judge you for saying “One quart made up of six flavors to go, please” and assume you were recently dumped while losing your job and being burgled all in one day.

B) You can get any combination of any number of flavors! Taro plus cheesecake plus cookies and cream? Sign me up.

C) It’s like…30 cents? or 39 cents? an ounce. I had about 7 ounces and 2 toppings and it was like $3.59. It’s cheaper than Pinkberry and a lot more fun! That’s a ratio I can live with.

D) See above re: Yogurtland: The Name! Don’t Yogurtland So Close to Me! The Leader of Yogurtland is tired and his eyes are growing old…

Everyone’s talking about it! I feel like this concept has been a long time coming, like how everyone always kind of had an idea that there had to be a way to invent Tivo and Youtube and auto-correcting spelling features in Word, this is exactly what frozen yogurt parlors (?) should have been all along.